

How to avoid risk without ignoring opportunity
Determining what is a real opportunity versus a speculative risk is a challenge. Over time, this becomes intuitive. In the meantime, following are a few questions to mull over: 1. What aren’t my competitors (especially my bigger competitors) doing this already? 2. Am I justifiably ahead of the curve or is there a flaw in the idea? 3. Am I evaluating the right numbers? 4. Am I in love with the opportunity so much that I am overly optimistic about the viability? The first q


What if you can’t afford marketing?
Although we specialize in working with smaller companies, there are some companies that are so small and on such a tight budget that they can’t afford to pay anyone to handle marketing. It’s a very frustrating situation, especially if the need is great. Here are a few workarounds to consider: 1. Sit down with your team to determine what hidden marketing skills they have. For example, many sales reps know how to use basic tools like MS Publisher to create marketing materials.

The Buyer’s Journey—Not Quite as Linear as We Thought
Gartner created a PowerPoint slide to illustrate just how complex the actual buyer’s journey is (see below). The main points being: 1. The journey isn’t as predictable as we believed 2. It’s also a lot more complex. So much for the sales funnel. If you are using Microsoft Clarity (a free tool that shows you exactly how users are navigating your webpages) or another tool such as StatCounter (a low-cost tool with the same functionality as Microsoft Clarity, but much better da

Reasons People Go to Contact Pages
I’m sure you’ve wondered why your Contact Us page is getting so much traffic (it’s usually #2 in volume just behind the homepage) and so few people are filling out the form. Actually, people go to Contact pages for a lot of reasons aside from filling out the form. Here are a few: 1. They just want a phone number (and an immediate response). Research shows that buyers would much rather reach out to you and get an immediate response rather than wait for someone to respond to